Should single men be allowed to buy a baby? Obviously not, you might think. But since 2019 British men have been legally allowed to obtain a child though the surrogacy process.
When a baby is born to a surrogate, they are often taken from their mother shortly afterwards, to prevent infant and mother bonding (in this country it is illegal to take a puppy from its mother before it is eight weeks old). A man can then apply for a ‘parental order’, in which a court will legally make them the child’s parent, without the full checks which an adoption would require. In the UK it is illegal to ‘pay’ a woman to be a surrogate but ‘reasonable expenses’ are typically between £10,000 to £15,000 – and can exceed £20,000.
And this only applies in the UK. Almost three-quarters of parental orders are now granted in relation to babies born abroad. This means that people are going overseas and buying babies via commercial surrogacy, circumventing the British ban on this practice.
The truth is that surrogacy is bad for mothers. They are more likely to develop new mental health problems both during and after pregnancy. This is unsurprising – to carry and birth a child knowing that you are going to immediately hand it over to a stranger is to reject every natural maternal instinct. What may be more surprising is that surrogacy is physically dangerous too. Research from 2024, which studied 860,000 births over a decade, found that surrogate mothers are over three times more likely to experience severe complications including sepsis, pre-eclampsia and postpartum haemorrhage.
[I]n Britain, since 2019, single men have also been allowed to buy babies. In that time 170 men have applied for parental orders.
This is even worse than allowing men to work in nurseries. We know that men are vastly more likely to abuse unrelated children than women are. We know that 91.3 per cent of child sexual abusers are male. And we know that paedophiles relentlessly seek out opportunities to access victims. The chance of single parent abuser being caught will be very low, given they may well be the only adult who has regular contact with the child.
In our pursuit of a society where we never say ‘no’ to anyone, we have created a legal structure which allows men to buy babies. Many of those 170 men may well be good at caring for their children, but the risk they pose on average to these babies is far too high. It’s time to start saying no. It might be very sad for some people that they can’t have children, but life is full of sadness and disappointment. We should not sacrifice mothers and babies in a vain effort to ensure that no one ever feels they missed out.
Source: Single men shouldn’t be able to have a surrogate baby | The Spectator